Alex Baer

Clint Eastwood has endorsed million dollar baby, Willard Romney, for President. Of the United States, that is, to be clear. The Mardis Gras parade, directed by Fellini in a Dali-esque style, marches on, magnum force.

Is there an angle here, Clint? Some Hollywood hijinks, macho box-office stunt, or some other mighty-mojo attempt from your various acting-directing-producing and many other auspices?

Romney for President of the delusional Self-Entitled Power-Climber's Society makes sense, or even for the turgid, "Let Them Eat Cake" Debutantes Cotillion, sure -- but for the leader of our nation, 312 million and more people? To interact with heads of state as Insulter or Court Jester du jour? Another ardent ducker of military service for Commander in Chief?

It has seemed for some time now that the world is hellbent on making campaigns of conversions -- not involving religion or philosophy, but making sure all normal and usual events are taken and converted into gibberish, transmuted into the surreal, then sprayed back at us like transmogrified clouds of pesticides.

Case in point: Clint Eastwood has come out for million dollar baby, Willard Romney, for President.

At first, I thought I'd accidentally tripped my bookmarked link for The Onion. I double-checked the page logos and address bar: Nope, the BBC.

We've all heard the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Except that it's not. The road to Hell is hellacious. It's not even paved. It's chip-sealed.

Three days ago, I'd never so much as heard the term. That was before our few-mile-long access road was invaded by a D-Day armada of construction vehicles and a herd of dinosaur-sized trucks filled with gravel.

Our road was tarred and our little world rocked -- literally. Now, I am certain of the decline of the American empire. There had not been much lingering doubt.

This unexceptional chip-sealing process, for use in this land of American exceptionalism, involves laying down a lane or so of hot, fluid asphalt -- tar, more or less -- on top of an old asphalt road that's been prepped-and-swept, then immediately topping it with gravel that's gone through a wash-and-dry cycle.

The human species keeps experiencing threshold moments. At times it seems everything's right on the brink. This time, there's a nice change: It's a good thing. There's even a love story here, as sincere and big-hearted as space.

First, the news: Fans of sci-fi and science fact are coming up on a special moment: knowing an object of human origin is about to move into interstellar space.

Nearly 35 years after launch, two Voyager spacecraft, sent aloft less than three weeks apart, in the summer of 1977, are thrumming along fine, and continue to send back intriguing accounts of their journeys.

You never know what will get the group's boxers and BVDs in a bundle. Topics range pretty far and wide, like always, down at Hack's BBQ Shack, in our usual booth.

There was the usual chit-chat first -- checking the temp on club members' relationships, jabbering a drizzle of baseball, tallying injuries from any DIY jobs, and finding out where everyone else's job search was pegged for the week on the Barf-O-Meter.

We talked shop -- blogging for free, from home. We don't talk about the crank-it-up, on-demand, enforced gold mine of the Olympic games, thank goodness. No-one's much interested in corporate somersaults, or in teevee.

Half of our members are likely using their sets as boat anchors, paperweights, or goldfish bowl display cases. The other half probably doesn't yet know that there's been a transition to digital, and that their old analog sets will now only get static from Mars.